On February 9th the world saw Kendrick Lamar take the stage as the first solo hip hop artist to headline the Super Bowl halftime show. This became the most watched halftime show of all time, overtaking the record previously held by Michael Jackson.
True to form, K-Dot turned his appearance into politically-charged performance art. The audience was first greeted by Sam Jackson’s satirically exaggerated Uncle Sam chiding the artist to “play the game”—meaning the game of conformity to and survival within American capitalist culture—and then to stop being “too loud, too reckless, too ghetto.” The caricature has invited comparisons to Jackson’s portrayal of Stephen in “Django Unchained,” but also held deeper connotations of the dark history of American minstrel shows. Thereupon Lamar signaled, “The revolution ‘bout to be televised/You picked the right time, but the wrong guy.” This was Kendrick calling out Donald Trump, who was in attendance, as a false idol of the working class. More Black voters supported Trump in 2024 than in 2020, especially young men. This support came primarily from workers’ disgust at their economic reality and repudiation of the Democrats’ campaign strategy of denying the crisis and reaffirming the institutions workers rightfully distrust, all while chasing the Republicans to the right. It’s the right time for revolution, Kendrick reflected, justifying Black people’s rage—but this is the wrong guy to embody it. Trump walked out on the game amidst K-Dot’s performance.
The spectacle that followed included a flank of backup dancers forming a divided American flag, a lit-up video game message reading “WARNING WRONG WAY” (another underhanded hint at the dangerous direction of the authoritarian right), and a dramatized prison yard. Fans of Lamar are no strangers to this style of visual storytelling and social commentary—in 2016 he famously performed in a chain gang on the stage of the Grammys to shed light on the gross injustice of mass incarceration, which affects Black workers over and above any other racial group, and at almost five times the rate of white workers.
The centerpiece of his set was “Not Like Us,” the culmination of an old school, highly public rap beef which just won Kendrick two of his five Grammys—despite having also earned him a defamation suit. That the song has tapped into mass consciousness on this scale—gaining over a billion streams on Spotify—can be explained by its broader themes. Lamar is not just going after Drake, but the whole abusive, billionaire superstructure he symbolizes, appropriating the culture of the Black working masses and turning it around to “pacify” them. All of this has proved more than the corporate machine of the NFL bargained for: despite the record-breaking viewership, they have since publicly repented of their grievous error in allowing K-Dot to perform, saying they should have gone with Lil Wayne instead. They did however take the measure of removing the slogan “End Racism” from the field and replacing it with the innocuous “Choose Love.”
Super Bowl LIX came at a pivotal moment. Kendrick has made a career delivering street poetry that unflinchingly examines the lived reality of the Black working class in America, in the often dark, ironic West Coast tradition of NWA and Tupac. That vision was sharpened by his rivalry with Drake, who K-Dot painted as a parasite leeching off the lifeblood of the culture while exemplifying the worst repercussions of capitalism, including abuse of minors. This comes in the wake of social movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, when masses of working people began fighting back against normalized misogynistic and racist abuse by people in power—and the subsequent right-wing backlash to those movements.
Kendrick’s message has resonated not just in the US, but across the international working class. Just after “Not Like Us” was released, the neoliberal regime of William Ruto in Kenya issued a finance bill that would have imposed new taxes on basic commodities workers need to survive, exacerbating Kenya’s already disastrous cost-of-living crisis. This gave rise to a countrywide youth movement, which beat back Ruto’s bill after only two days of street protests: an inspiring example of a victory won through mass struggle. An anthem of the movement, “Reject Hio Bill” by Kenyan rapper Sabi Wu, sampled “Not Like Us”—calling out the corrupt government and the rich who share nothing in common with the youth and working class of Kenya. This harkens back to when Lamar’s own “Alright” became a street theme of the early BLM movement in 2015, with tens of thousands of young people chanting “We gon’ be alright” in the face of police violence against Black workers.
The international implications also came to bear in Kendrick’s halftime show, when Zul-Qarnain Nantambu, a member of the show’s production team, unfurled a joint Sudanese and Palestinian flag accompanied by a heart and raised fist. Sudan has been torn apart by two years of civil war, fueled by material support for the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces by the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. imperialist client state. And the world has watched in horror as the genocidal Israeli regime has brought hell upon Gaza and the wider Middle East, thanks to the billions in aid from Biden and the escalated support of Trump (who now wants to take “ownership” of Gaza, finally clearing the land of all its Palestinian inhabitants and turning it into a seaside resort). Nantambu, a guerilla artist who seized the opportunity to expose the blood on the hands of US-Israeli imperialism, was promptly detained by event security.
Artists like these play a vital role in both shaping and reflecting consciousness, which is why their work gains such a resounding echo amongst workers facing the exploitation of capitalism. As the manifold crises of the system escalate and become more dire, working people will increasingly create and engage with art that grapples with the many injustices and disasters they experience every day. But artistic statements can only go so far; lasting change can only be won by class struggle.